


Schrödinger's Athos

by Arithanas



Category: Les Trois Mousquetaires | The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
Genre: Meta!fic, Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-05
Updated: 2015-06-05
Packaged: 2018-04-02 22:34:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,026
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4076257
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Arithanas/pseuds/Arithanas
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Meta commentary in form of theatrical dialogue with a multidisciplinary approach and a hint of humor (I hope) around the fact Athos could not even be married to Milady.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Schrödinger's Athos

**Author's Note:**

> All the characters are the polyphonic voice of several persons who show a regular fan the error of their ways. At least, they tried to taught Fan to think critically; all of them are identified for the subject in question.
> 
> ****  
> _Dramatis personæ_  
>  Fan ― a regular fan with preconceived ideas.  
> History ― general western history with a more than hint of French history.  
> Theology — mostly related to Catholic catechism, the history of some Ecumenical council and of Counter-Reformation.  
> Lit ― their job is to keep the work as a whole and to guard it from Fanon, not that Lit is awfully effective. In occasions, Lit has outbursts of feminism.  
> CDA — Stands for Critical Discourse Analysis. Mostly there to point out what is said, what is not said and what one can safely guess.  
> Fanon ― Do I need to explain?

_That’s what one gets from making daring declarations such as  
“Athos was married to Milady”…_

That’s what one gets from making daring declarations such as “Athos was married to Milady”…

 **History  
** Excuse me! What do you know about marriage?

 **Fan  
** The same everyone knows these days.

 **History  
** Please, don’t tell me you are committing the vulgarity of measuring the actions on a historic novella on today standards.

 **Lit  
** What are you calling a novella?

 **History  
** Well, a frigging kid story…

 **Fan & Lit  
**How dare you!

 **History  
** Ok, ok... For the sake of discussion, let’s agree that every work of art receive a direct influence of their time period, their uses and their specific time and circumstances.

 **Lit  
** I can agree to that.

 **Fan  
** If you say so…

 **History  
** When doing it right one can get awesome details, like the _Jeunesse_ , it depicts the lovely custom of “ferrer l’épouse” . So… Fan stated: “Athos was married to Milady”, what is marriage?

 **Fan  
** Hey! I’m here for the funny and exciting story, not for the historical context.

 **Lit  
** Hush, Fan, it comes with the genre.

 **Fan,** _grudgingly  
_ Marriage is a social contract that bounds two persons either religiously or in a civil manner.

 **History  
** So, are there two kinds of marriage?

 **Lit  
** Don’t play coy, History. There are several types of marriage. Fan is parroting their upbringing.

 **Fan  
** Please, Lit, don’t help me.

 **History  
** I’ll go to the point, then: Athos wasn’t married to Milady.

 **Fanon  
** Of course they were married! She was the love of his life!

 **Lit  
** Yeah, sure... Go play there, kiddo.

 **Fan  
** Oh, yes they were! Chapter 63: _"And me," said Athos, "--she is my wife!"_

 **CDA,** _distracted_ **  
** Athos was saying “mine is bigger”.

 **Fanon  
** Ooooh!

 **Fan  
** What?!

 **CDA  
** Yes. My right to see that woman dead is bigger than yours. What was you thinking?

 **Fan  
** Nothing, I wasn’t thinking, really. Go ahead, History, why wasn’t he married?

 **History  
** The Ordinance of Blois was still in force.

 **Fan  
** Oh, perfectly clear, you know, since everyone knows what that Ordinance is. It’s very famous.

 **Lit  
** You need to discuss further, History.

 **History  
** Henri III, in 1579, issued a bunch of rules and put the basis for French public Law. Article 3 is related to the marriage register and demands some unavoidable requirements.

 **Fan,** _taking notes_ **  
** Such as…?

 **History  
** It demanded four witnesses, parental consent, at least 3 public banns of marriage, and to lay it down in the parochial registry.

 **Fan,** _crestfallen_ **  
** Oh, Dumas didn’t say a thing about that in the book.

 **Fanon  
** It doesn’t matter: Love triumph all!

 **Lit  
** Hey, Fanon, have you noticed the sexual tension on chapter 45? ( _Tosses the book_ ) That will keep them busy. Anyway, Fan, chapter 65 proves you wrong: “I married her in opposition to the wishes of all my family”.

 **CDA  
** ‘All’ implies: Even the parents, so he had no parental consent.

 **Fan  
** It doesn’t mean a thing. He was 25 years old, what could his daddy do about it? Ground him?

 **History,** _laughs hysterically._  


**Fan  
** What’s so funny?

 **History  
** Athos was underage with all those years. In February 1556 a royal edict stipulated 17 years as full age for public law but 25 years old for women and 30 years old for men for private law. Marriage is private law: he couldn’t marry Milady just because he wanted.

 **Theology  
** Oh, he could pretty well. Canon law deemed women of 12 years and men of 14 fit to take the marriage sacrament; if they exchanged their vows they are married.

 **History  
** Hello, oh, eclipse of the Reason. And maybe they weren’t: Milady could be Protestant.

 **Theology,** with _evident acrimony_ **  
** Hello, bringer of Despair. That’s not possible: She was a nun and the first protestant movements didn’t hold nunneries and congregations, two different sorts of religion institutions which are determined by the solemn vows and exclaustration.

 **Lit,** _recovering the book_ **  
** Also, chapter 29, she attended to mass. Clearly, she’s no protestant.

 **CDA  
** Yeah. Like Athos wasn’t a protestant.

 **Fan  
** Wait! Chapter 52: “As if the Catholic religion was not the most advantageous and the most agreeable of all religions!”

 **Lit  
** As if Dumas wasn’t a hack. As if the whole books was not tainted by an unreliable narrator.

 **Fanon  
** Blasphemy!

 **Lit  
** It’s all there in the prologue: “Now, this is the first part of this precious manuscript which we offer to our readers…”

 **CDA  
** Which manuscript? Who’s the author?

 **Lit  
** Chill out, CDA. Dumas is talking about the fictive "Memoirs of the Comte de la Fère, Touching Some Events Which Passed in France Toward the End of the Reign of King Louis XIII and the Commencement of the Reign of King Louis XIV" which was supposed to be the basis of The Three Musketeers and Twenty years after. Word of Dumas.

 **Fanon  
** Amen…

 **Fan  
** I see… was it an assurance against the possible failure of that little serial?

 **Lit  
** It wasn’t his first, but certainly this project was particularly ambitious. Who am I to judge if he wanted to get a bit meta?

 **Theology  
** Anyway, the fact remains the same: they were married under the eyes of the church, even if they weren’t under the law.

 **Fanon  
** Hurray! You can’t…!

 **History  
** No, they weren’t: Remember the Council of Trent!

 **Theology  
** I concur, without two witnesses...

 **History  
** Four!

 **Theology  
** Two!

 **History  
** Four!

 **Theology  
** Two! I don’t care what that bugger of a Valois has to say!

 **Fan  
** If two are enough for a religious marriage, then they are married.

 **Theology, History and Lit  
** What…?

 **Fan  
** The servants: Grimaud and Milady’s maid.

 **CDA  
** You can’t count on the servants.

 **Fan  
** Why not? They are children of God!

 **Theology  
** Fan has a point.

 **Fanon  
** Tell them, Fan!  Defend that marriage!

 **CDA  
** Servants are essentially under the power of their masters. They can’t bear witness because there is always some coercion in their discourse. They belong to their masters.

 **History  
** Some researchers regarded them as part of the family. Family can’t bear witness

 **Fanon  
** They were married, we know they were!

 **Theology  
** Without witnesses they are not.

 **History  
** Finally, some sense!

 **Theology  
** But canon law can accept the servants.

 **History,** _groans_  


**Fan  
** It makes no sense! If they were not married why hang her?

 **Fanon  
** Because it’s such a beautiful tragedy…

 **Lit  
** Because Athos knew…

 **History  
** What did he knows?

 **Lit  
** Everything. What do you believe he was thinking in Chapter 35? Despite his words he knew she was alive and, to make it worst, in chapter 38, he was about to faint because Athos knew he was in the wrong and he was reckoning the consequences.

 **Fan  
** Get out!

 **Lit  
** You can’t have it both ways either “He knew what were the rights of the great landowners” as Dumas said in Chapter 27…

 **Fanon,** _swoons and gasps_.

 **Lit  
** Or he was really stupid and he tried to repair it while writing his memories.

 **History  
** I hear you. Same chapter 27: “He had on his estates the rights of high and low tribunals”. Since 1520 the French landlords has not the right to capital punishment (High Justice) without a Royal Judge’s approbation.

 **Lit  
** Just imagine his situation: he came sniffing around Milady and she didn’t put out, because even at 16 she has some sense...

 **Fanon  
** A child bride!

 **Theology  
** What did I say earlier? She was fit since 12 years old for marriage and for carnal congress. There is no such thing as a child bride here if she was over 12!

 **Fan  
** Please, continue…

 **Fanon  
** But it was not her fault…!

 **Lit  
** Go and write a fic, then! Where was I…? Oh, yes! So, the only way she would be his would be as his wife.

 **Fan  
** He must put a ring on her…

 **Lit  
** Stay with me. This was a clandestine marriage, a great tradition on literature, and it was premeditated as a way to get into her knickers but without any legitimacy.

 **History  
** That was the very reason the Ordinance of Blois was issued: to regulate the secret marriages between the scions of noble houses without sense enough to keep it in their pants, especially among Catholics and Protestants.

 **Theology  
** Huguenots, be proper in your denominations.

 **Lit  
** I can bet a blade of glass against a barrel of rum that Athos tried to keep her like a secret but Milady is not a woman to be kept under for long. I suspect he never put their names in any registry.

 **History  
** That’s the only way he could keep his head over his neck. Well, that and that they never found the body.

 **Fan, Fanon and Lit  
** WHAT?

 **Theology  
** With a body to bury he would be a widower, and he could marry again…

 **Fanon,** _cheerfully_ **.  
** We can write him a beautiful bride, just like us!

 **Theology  
** That is if he could convince them that they broke her neck falling off a horse, because if they proof he killed her then all good doctors would quote Aquina’s _Summa theologica Supplementum tertiae Questio 60 Article 2_ : “By the Church's decree wife-murder is an impediment to marriage”

 **Fanon,** _sorrowful_ **.  
** That’s so unfair!

 **Fan  
** Can we return to Athos and his risked neck?

 **History  
** Article 41: The king allows the parents to disinherit the ungrateful child who commits a clandestine marriage. Article 42: minors who married against their parent’s wishes are condemned to death “sans espérance de grâce et pardon”, that is, without appeal. If he went almost scot free was because there was no proof of their marriage.

 **Fanon  
** Oh, noes…!

 **Lit  
** He was off the hook relatively easy. He could argue she was just his in-house lover and she went with the wind as soon as his luck went shaky. That fortunate dog! No wonder he had no luck to spare for the rest of his life.

 **Fan  
** He was in perpetual poverty in the book, how could that be possible?

 **History  
** That could have an explanation: They couldn’t prove anything against Athos, but that doesn’t mean they couldn’t let it go just like that.

 **Theology  
** He was married after all, if they took the servants as witnesses.

 **History  
** And living in blatant concubinage, if they went hunting together serves as an indication,  was hardly act deemed worthy of the noble status. Surely they let the _dérogeance_ fell over his head.

 **Fan  
** What’s that?

 **History  
** Being a noble in France was awesome, just by being born in the right family you are excepted of most taxes. If you want to punish someone you made them suffer _la dérogeance_ , that’s it, you are still a noble but you pay taxes like a peasant, and taxes are 90% or so of what you get, hence the perpetual poverty.

 **Theology  
** Also, he had taken a sacrament. He was damaged goods for his family: he could not be married until the body was found, and if the body was found he couldn’t marry for being a wife killer.

 **Lit  
** Finally a part that makes sense. Chapter 67: “Athos alone from time to time raised his expansive brow; a flash kindled in his eyes, and a bitter smile passed over his lips, then, like his comrades, he sank again into reverie.” He noticed he could finally recover his former glory: Milady was dead, a professional got her head off and he had a powerful witness named Richelieu.

 **History  
** He still committed a clandestine marriage.

 **Lit  
** Nobody will remember that after a complete lustrum, or maybe they did and that was why he never returned to La Fère. Besides, by that time, Athos discovered he liked the single life.

 **Fan  
** So Athos was a horndog who tried to take advantage of someone who was using him and has even less knowledge than him, all became a rather desperate situation: his life or hers and she made it easy for him: she was a criminal.

 **Fanon  
** How tragic…!

 **History  
** I do wonder if your Dumas made something right or if he tangled the yarn for his own amusement.

 **CDA  
** Historical truth is a girl you can rape, as long as you give her beautiful children.

 **Lit  
** Misogynistic much?

 **CDA  
** I just quote what the man has said.

 


End file.
